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The ship, and the second circle, shot away. In seconds it was beyond my instruments’ reach. Now it seemed the white line extended to the first circle, and there it stopped. But only from our viewpoint: the jet of matter was passing instantaneously out of the other side of the wormhole, now further away with every passing second, and thence to the engines of the ship.

It was accelerating the probe, and with it the other side of the wormhole, to within a fraction of the speed of light. Both sides of the wormhole remained connected – there was literally no space between them, and no time. Our end of the wormhole existed in the ship’s time-frame, not in ours.

To an observer on the ship, relativistic time-dilation would shorten a journey of centuries to days – eventually, as its velocity crept closer and closer to the impassable eternity of the photon, millions of years to minutes, then trillions to seconds. In thirty or so ship-board years, it would reach the edge of the observable universe, and the heat-death or the Big Crunch.

And for all of those years, our side of the wormhole would be in the same place, and the same time, as the side that was with the ship. We had built a gateway to the stars – and to the future. In thirty years, if we wanted, we could walk to the end of time.

Meg, the succubus, was sitting on the sofa, pouting as I channel-hopped the television. I ignored her blatant impatience and wafts of aphrodisiac pheromones; she’s just a fucking machine, I told myself. Since the probe’s launch two days earlier the pace of work had slackened, and the television started to show news and entertainment. The news had an oddly stilted, house-journal quality: it was all solar weather-reports, interviews with rehabilitated crew-members – as we were now called – and accounts of what a great job we were doing. The entertainment was movies, game-shows, plays. Some of them were classics (somebody out here had a thing about Gillian Anderson) but most were unfamiliar to me. Their contemporary references gave no hint of the regression of civilisation I’d been shown in the orientation pack. It was exactly as if everything on Earth was what most people in my time would have expected the late twenty-first century world to be like: a bit crowded, a bit decadent; and that we, here, were picking it up after a few light-hours’ delay, in a space construction-site whose workers were for some obscure but accepted reason confined to individual space-tugs.

In short, it was as if what Reid had said on my first day here, and what the orientation package had told me, were quite untrue. I didn’t dare to hope, but I could imagine how some people would. I wondered what new item on our masters’ agenda this phoney reassurance implied.

Assuming what I saw really were broadcasts, and not something specifically aimed at me…once more I was overwhelmed by the impossibility of determining what was and wasn’t real. I was at a low point, strung out. Six more days until I got back in the macro, four days since I’d been in. The effect of my last visit was wearing thin, and my next was a painfully long time in the future. At some level I missed the people I’d known in life, but that was masked by a more desperate yearning to meet again my superhuman friends. Would they even remember me? How much more powerful would they have become?

‘You’re troubled, Jon,’ Meg whispered in my ear, putting her arms around me. ‘Come to bed.’

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘Fuck off, you fucking puppet!’

Her eyes brimmed with convincing tears.

‘Jon, I know I’m a fucking puppet, but I have feelings too. You’re hurting me.’

‘You’re just a program.’

She blinked and half-smiled, looking up at me in an irritatingly placatory way. ‘So are you, Jon, and you have feelings.’

I stared, startled by her argument. Not its content, but that she was making it at all.

‘You once told me,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘that you could be whatever I wanted.’

She brightened. ‘Yes! I can!’

‘Could you be more intelligent than me?’

She frowned in momentary concentration. ‘How much more intelligent?